I admit completely that one of the biggest reasons, perhaps the reason, that I spent my hard-earned money on a copy of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade game back in the day was because of the Grail Diary in the box.
LucasArts is finally bringing back several of its older games and franchises, in a variety of ways. This week, the new Tales of Monkey Island series debuts. Next week, the original Secret of Monkey Island will launch on Xbox Live Arcade with optional new HD graphics. And the publisher said today that it will bring more of its older games to Steam, including Last Crusade, a point-and-click adventure in the Monkey Island style that follows the plot of the third Indy flick.
The Last Crusade movie resonated with me moreso than the others in the series because I loved the idea of puzzles and hidden treasures, and what was this movie but a treasure hunt, with its book of cryptic clues and lost secrets of ancient religion? The fact that the game included a replica of the movie’s central MacGuffin, the diary of Henry Jones Sr., was enough to get me to buy it.
The fact that I was already a dyed-in-the-wool fan of point-and-click adventure games helped, of course, but I didn’t say I wouldn’t have ended up playing the game otherwise — just that I was convinced to actually pay for it. Not that we ended up pirating very many games once the CD-ROM format became standard, mind you, as the increased size made it impractical.
The Grail Diary was, although I couldn’t have articulated it to you at the time, a many-layered method of copy protection. In the days before online DRM, there was, generally speaking, nothing that a PC game publisher could do to stop consumers from making as many copies of a piece of software as they liked.
What they did, instead was twofold: Make it difficult to play the game without being in possession of the game’s hard-copy instruction manual, and make it more enticing to own the game by including awesome physical goods in the package.